Roadside colossi: the global allure of a really Big Thing and the Queensland expert plotting their rise | Queensland

Perched atop a traffic island in Banjarmasin, Indonesia, is a proboscis monkey. Leaping from a roundabout in Mahdia, Tunisia, is a swordfish. Sprouting from an intersection in Kundasang, Malaysia, is a cabbage.

What unites this mammal in the delta city of the jungles of Borneo, fish in the ancient Mediterranean port and vegetable in the hill station of Sabah is size. For these are not things of ordinary proportion – these things are big. And they are just three of almost 10,000 big things scattered upon the face of the Earth that now, for the first time, have been painstakingly mapped and researched.

The woman putting those big pins on the map is the academic authority on big things (or “larger than life roadside colossi”, in scholarly parlance), Dr Amy Clarke. The University of the Sunshine Coast historian had for years argued – in peer-reviewed articles, no less – for the prevailing wisdom that oversized roadside monuments were a largely US, Canadian and Australian phenomenon.

Until one day in early 2024, while searching a stock photo website for something entirely unrelated, she stumbled upon an image of a big spiky fruit.

“This durian, I was just staring at,” Clarke recalls. “I was excited, of course, but I also remember thinking … ‘Oh no. Oh no’.”

Clarke has a “very visual memory” and says she recalls almost every big thing she has ever seen. And, despite researching roadside monuments for more than a decade, she had never seen that most pungent of fruits made big.

“I remember thinking: ‘oh God, I hope this is the only one I’ve missed’”.

It was not. By Clarke’s latest count, there are at least 23 big durians scattered throughout countries – including Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand – in which it is revered as king of the fruits.

What followed that first durian was an exhaustive 11-month long internet odyssey which would not only upend everything the expert in architectural heritage thought she knew about big things, but how she made sense of the world itself.

By methodically trawling through image banks in more than 72 languages and dialects, from Albanian to Zulu, and refining her search methods beyond translations of the term “big thing”, Clarke was able to peer beyond the panorama of oversized objects the English-speaking internet could offer.

From Nambour, Queensland to Bathurst, South Africa to Sarikei, Malaysia, there are about 45 big pineapples around the world. There are, Clarke has found, also about 106 apples, 53 oranges and 12 onions.

From big magic carpets in north Africa to a big drop of balsamic oil in Modena, Clarke journeyed through a new world of strange and wonderful big things. She presented her as-yet unpublished findings to the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand conference in Brisbane last week.

While there is no official definition of a big thing, she proposed a list of criteria to her colleagues: the thing should be a larger-than-life “everyday object”, should exclude explicitly political or religious subject matter – such as giant statues of Buddha or Jesus – and be made from readily available materials with bright colours, often (though not always) by anonymous amateurs.

“There are, in fact, landmarks identifiable as big things in every global region except for Antarctica,” she told the assembled scholars, presenting slides that ranged from big pomegranates in Saudi Arabia to an oversized macaw in Bolivia.

The US, Canada and Australia, Clarke revealed, accounted for less than half of the 9,954 big things she documented in a global survey that listed more than 900 big things in south-east Asia, more than 700 in central and South America and more than 400 in the Middle East.

“This is a global phenomenon and it is time for Australians and north Americans to realise that,” Clarke says. “For too long, we’ve dominated the conversation when it comes to big things, without realising that this is something that the rest of the world is doing too.

“Why haven’t we been talking about that?”

Part of the answer to that question may be explained by how seriously Australia takes its big things, putting them on stamps and coins and elevating them to the “upper echelon” of culture.

Part may be where they sit in the landscape. North American and Australian big things tend to emerge by the sides of long and sometimes featureless stretches of highway, lending themselves to landmark status.

In many other parts of the world, Clarke’s research has found, big things are placed upon roundabouts and traffic islands in bustling cities. “But it probably also says something about the dominance of western culture globally,” she says.

It is not that countries like Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates and Turkey are hiding their big things – they are, of course, explicitly made to be seen. “It’s just that the western world hasn’t bothered to look,” Clarke says.

She is not the only academic applying a critical lens to the world of big things. Dr Maja Zonjić is a Croatian film-maker and cultural geographer and the recipient of a three-year grant from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Marsden fund to study big things in New Zealand.

There, as in Australia, many are imported agricultural products that have come to “absorb a town’s identity”.

“So Te Puke is known as the kiwi fruit capital of New Zealand,” Zonjić says. “Ohakune is known as the carrot capital … Katikati is known as the avocado capital of New Zealand.

Whose story, for example, is the Ohakune carrot telling, Zonjić wondered. “And then, conversely, whose story is it not telling? Whose story is actually in its shadow? Because that shadow is both literally and proverbially quite large.”

But while when viewed individually, the brute simplicity of a big thing might obscure “rich histories and really complex negotiations of identity”, collectively, they may speak something of a universal language.

“There are so many things that divide us,” Clarke says. “But every part of the world seems to love putting massive pieces of fruit and vegetables in their landscape.

“That must say something about us as humans”.